What do you get when you cross Ticket to Ride and Gaylus?

Some times you have to play something Crappy. I love that heading for the Euro forum. Like many gamers, my gaming time is split. Over the last 6 months my split is 20% AT, 30% Wallace, 20% Kids/Family games, 30% crappy Euros. My AT gaming is low because Uba lives 500 miles from Maryland and Malloc or Iganaditty only get together when there is a total eclipse of the sun or when our work, wives or kids let us free at the same time. So until Trashfest in May my Crappy Euro to AT ratio will be out of balance.

In the meantime, I've been working my way through the 2007 Essen games one by one looking for something a little less crappy.

So what do you get when you cross Ticket to Ride and Gaylus?

A. A Crappy Euro game

B. A Gay Ride

C. Tribune or maybe the one of the better pure Euros I've played in couple of years

Sorry, but my answer is C and fuck you all. I played Tribune and I actually liked it. Tribune actually won the Essen Fairplay poll (the gayest name I've ever heard for a poll) beating out a number of other Euro games about farming.

Now, I have to admit I played a hand made version of the game. A Euro guy I know was frustrated by the FFG delay of the game and he made a hand made version of the game using other Euro game pieces (just shows how interchangeable the Euros have become). I think playing the handmade version, stripped of all the pasted on theme actually helped the game. When learning the game and playing the game it seemed more like a complicated new poker game that Caesars Palace in Las Vegas was pushing to get me away from the Black Jack tables.

I've seen photos of the game at Essen and it looks like a cheap version of Pillars of the Earth. Hopefully, FFG will skip the boring Euro version of the game and go for my vision of the game where the slave market is full of nude exotic dancers and the Vestal Virgins wear thong high togas and serve free drinks and game box is hard to open.

The designer of Tribune is Karl-Heinz Schmiel. His best known game is Die Macher (actually I've never played Die Macher). The only Schmiel I've played is Attila which I thought sucked. Ok, here's somebody on BGG giving a real review of the game:


www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/248383

So what do I like about the game:

For me the game played like a Euro should. It was easy to teach, lasted only 60 minutes, it was kind of intense and actually kind of fun. Over the last few years here are some of the Euro games that fit that bill for me: Pompeii, Mission Red Planet, Ingenious, Ubongo, Thebes and Titan the Arena.

The game uses drafting. As a sports fan I like drafting it makes sense to me and it's much faster than auctions.

The game was designed by Schmiel and I like saying the name Schmiel. The name sounds like a Nazi sausage.

With a name like KingPut, most people would think my favorite Euro theme was Egypt but really it's ancient Rome. Rome is great they have warfare, politics, gladiators, orgies, murder, sex, chariot races, Caligula, volcanoes and wine. This is one of the first Roman Euros that's not about building shit.

In Tribune there's no farming, no cubes, no building up your economic engine.

The game is better than the other Essen games I've played: Cube-a-Cuba, Agricola, Containers and In the Year of the Dragon.

This isn't a victory point game. In this game you race to get 4 – 6 tasks done (get 3 legions, become tribune, get bless of gods, control 4 factions, get 30 coins, get 8 laurels). Yes, the tie breaker is victory points if 2 or more players get there tasks done on the same turn but it’s more about racing to get your tasks done.

The game is played with cards with numbers and suites (ok factions) just like Poker and Black Jack not with cubes (all I need is the Caesars Palace waitress in a toga to give me a free drink and I’ll be all set).

All that said it's still very much a rip off of Ticket to Ride with factions rather than rail road tracks and it rips off of the drafting system in Pillars or Caylus. If FFG wants to take their time launching this game I’m very cool with that. I’d rather them work on launching some good trash like Dune, Starcraft and Battlestar. However, I hope I don't have to wait forever because if I have to play In the Year of the Dragon or Ticket to Ride one more time in the next three months I'll have to blow my brains out.